Shakespeare — Wherefore Art Thou?: The Washington Post has this interesting article up about how Shakespeare can be just as appealing to kids as adults, citing lines like “creeping like a snail unwillingly to school” from As You Like It. Apparently the Folger Library’s current exhibit, “Golden Lads and Lasses”, is all about how Shakespeare’s writing has been changed for kids over the centuries. There are toys, games, books, CDs…finger puppets, comic books, Barbies…

Love it. My daughter’s not quite four yet and it pains me that I can’t share Shakespeare with her quite yet (though I have tried). The Tempest is still “The story about the girl on the island,” but every time we try to get into any more depth than that she gets confused by all the characters. Disney needs to do a Tempest movie :).

Gotta love this quote from Paloma, a sixth-grader: “Macbeth is my favorite,” she said. (She read the adult version of that one.) “It’s really cool. There are witches and prophecies and fighting and stuff. And the strongest character is a lady — Macbeth’s wife. Girl power!”

Someone’s got to explain to that girl about the whole guilt theme and exactly what it did to Lady Macbeth’s “strength” 🙂
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The First Post is holding a contest to find “your best Shakespeare pun to create an advertising slogan for a well-known brand or product”. Prizes include a bottle of champagne and a genuine Ye Olde Feather Quill from Stratford-upon-Avon.

When I wrote for my company newsletter I would title articles things like “Now is the winter of our web content” and “Lord what tools these portals be”, but I suppose those are a little too geeky for this crowd :). I’ll have to work on my broader audience puns.

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Quotes Mistakenly Attributed to Shakespeare:

Good list. I know that #1 (“Oh what a tangled web we weave….”) is a big one. I’ve been asked about it personally.

Does anybody really think “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is Shakespeare? Oh for the youth of the world.

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‘She’s the Man’ Is a Boy/Girl Thing – Amanda Bynes goes butch for her latest comedy – Zap2it

UPDATED April 2023 — Unfortunately, the original link has long since broken, but I’m keeping the post up for historical reasons. “She’s The Man” has occupied a spot on innumerable “teen Shakespeare comedies” lists for years, and it’s amusing to realize that I’ve been doing this since before it had even come out!

Not really a review, just an interview with Amanda Bynes, who plays Viola in this teen remake of Twelfth Night. I don’t have nearly enough movie opportunities to go and see something like this, but maybe if it eventually floats its way back to cable, I can catch it. Sounds cute enough.

How about Hamlet and Laertes settling their differences in the boxing ring? “A Thousand Natural Shocks” apparently takes the four youngest characters — Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes and Horatio — and puts them in a contemporary setting to work out their differences and deal with the world around them. It does sound interesting, and the team behind it (who use the acronym TEAM, for Theatre of the Emerging American Movement) seem to have some points to make beyond putting the characters in silly situations:

Sieh’s Ophelia chooses, in her madness, not to focus on important political changes, but instead on consumer-ism, looking pretty and trying to make people feel happy. “It’s very easy for an American to do that. We’re taught by our president to pay no attention to ‘the man behind the curtain’. It’s the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Ophelia turning everything into flowers,” says Chavkin.

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